CHAPTER FIVE
Toil and Trouble
The summer of 1925, like most summers in the nation’s capital, was almost unbearably hot and sultry. Even after one of those violent electrical storms had whirled up the Potomac and deluged the blistered asphalt with a tropical downpour, its passing left the whole town sweltering in a steaming heat, even more prostrating than before the storm. It was sticky enough in the permanent buildings, but in our temporary shack on Constitution Avenue, work became quite impossible, and we often sent the Bureau staff home in the early afternoons. And before that fateful summer could pass, lightning struck twice in the same place—BUAERO.
When Bruce Leighton had passed out to sea, most of his small staff went with him, having already overstayed their allotted period of duty on shore. Luckily, Ricco Botta, a lieutenant who had come in by way of the Naval Reserve, held over with me. A pilot, an engineer, and a skilled mechanic he had now become the practical wheelhorse of the Engine Section. Later on, Henry Mullinix joined up, bringing just the right qualities to balance out our little organization. Henry had been honor man in his class at Annapolis, had later led his flight class at Pensacola, and had finally completed the aviation postgraduate course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with top honors. And along with his intellect, Henry had a fine personality and an admirable character. Our organization was rounded out by young Lt. (jg) Ralph Parsons, who now handled the highly technical liaison with the Aero Engine Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory, Philadelphia, while Henry, Ricco, and I concentrated on the task of cleaning up the bugs in the engines and accessories under our cognizance.
Take, for instance, the Lawrance J-1 air-cooled radial engine, that coffee grinder on which all our hopes were based. It was so rickety that Lt. C. C. Champion, a rising young West Coast pilot, formally reported to BUAERO that, when embarking on a fifteen-mile cross-country flight from the Naval Air Station at North Island, near San Diego, to an emergency airport at Ream Field, down near the Mexican border, his squadron always carried a whole “quiverful” of spare push rods to replace those sure to be sprayed along the beach of the Coronado Silver Strand. Our treatment for this sort of trouble was to call in Charlie Lawrance or Guy Vaughan of Wright Aero and give them a session of plain and fancy kidding, with just the right amount of sting in it.
The magnetos for our air-cooled engines were something to write home about. Here was the instrument that provided the vital spark so essential to keep the engine ticking over, yet it had proved the least dependable of the parts of the high-strung mechanism behind which pilots risked their lives. And when we looked around for more promising sources of supply, none was to be found. The Delco Company, producers of the wartime Liberty battery-generator ignition systems, could not be interested in a new development; the volume to be expected was too small. The manufacturer of cheap truck magnetos, to whom we now looked, was willing to brighten up the outside finish but was unwilling to go further for the same reason—no volume. The board of directors of the great General Electric Company had, we were advised, studied the problem with ponderous care and finally concluded there was more money in electric light bulbs. A small privately owned company was willing to help, but lacked know-how. It looked like a stalemate until the Army Engineering Division at McCook Field discovered Scintilla.
Scintilla magnetos proved to be the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Made in Soleure, Switzerland, they could be bought through Tom Fagan, of New York, and at a reasonable price. However, since we could not place full dependence on a foreign source that might be cut off in time of war, we investigated the possibility of creating an American source. The Swiss company had an excess of machinery and personnel and was willing to export them, but the red tape surrounding such a transaction, even back there in the days when the United States government had faith in private enterprise, tied us hand and foot. To cut through the tangle involved so many risks that we should have been completely discouraged save that the other alternative was to accept responsibility for the deaths of youngsters who daily risked their lives in the air.
In dilemmas of this kind, resort might be had to what was politely called “memoranda for file” but known privately as “the cover-up.” A letter was prepared for the file covering the details of the proposed transaction and carried through the whole system to be finally approved by the Secretary of the Navy himself. Then, after the Great Seal of the Navy Department had been attached, and the author had privately retained a copy for his own use, the document was carefully filed away against the day when some Congressional investigation might be looking for a noteworthy scalp. When the spirit of cover-up gets into a business organization, the evil finally shows up in the financial results; in government it is just absorbed by the taxpayer.
It was through such a time-consuming process that we finally succeeded in transporting a part of the Swiss company bodily to the town of Sidney, New York, where it continued to be this country’s source of dependable magnetos. And the time even came when I had to flash the Great Seal of the Navy Department to keep from being crucified for bringing it here. Later, when Charles A. Lindbergh arrived in London, after having flown the Atlantic behind a Scintilla magneto, it turned out that the General Electric Company had all along had the license to manufacture the British Thompson Houston Company’s magneto, but no one in Schenectady had recalled the fact.
Meanwhile, in addition to concentrating on the job of keeping engines running, we had not neglected the other task of getting them started. The Aeromarine Inertia Starter, created by Chilton under Leighton’s initiative, though employing a quite novel principle—the utilization of energy stored in a flywheel—had developed into the most dependable and efficient device in our gear locker. When, therefore, Messrs. Charles Marcus and Raymond P. Lansing of the Eclipse Machine Company called on us with a view to interesting us in a line of electric starters they had developed for the Army, we presented them with an affable but none the less impenetrable front. Things electric not only involved heavy lead storage batteries, heavy copper motors, and everything else designed around “base metals,” but they always proved undependable and difficult to maintain. My years as engineer officer on a man-of-war had generated in me a sales resistance of many ohms.
On the day when we were honored with the visit from Charles Marcus and Ray Lansing, I bolstered my disinterest with a glowing and somewhat detailed account of the virtues of the Chilton starter and was somewhat taken aback by Charles Marcus’s suave remark that Aeromarine had infringed an Eclipse patent involving the fundamentals of the Bendix drive. Marcus doubted that Eclipse could let Aeromarine live at all, and his inference was that I should shift my enthusiasm over to the Army-type starter.